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The relevance of ancient history to the contemporary study of international politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2009

Robert Purnell
Robert Purnell
Affiliation:
Lecturer in International Politics, University College of Wales, Aberystwyth
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Extract

The implied assumption about Ancient History, which in the present discussion will comprise mainly Graeco–Roman history, is that ‘relevance’ obtains. What this will chiefly mean is that in some sense history does teach lessons, and that specifically Ancient History has lessons to teach students of international affairs at the present day. A massive assumption, it may be thought. Some suggestions towards a defence of the proposition appear later. What might seem more readily defensible is the view that it is the present which may illuminate the past. Here the lessons of history, if we admit them, become retrospective. If Winston Churchill in certain aspects of his career in the 1930s resembled the orator Demosthenes in the fourth century B.C. pronouncing his Anti-Philippics, even more revealingly, perhaps, in enhancing contemporary understanding of the latter period, did Demosthenes fulfil the role of Winston Churchill in his “wilderness years”.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , April 1976 , pp. 27 - 40
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 1976

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References

page 27 note 1 See Cramer, F. H., ‘Isolationism: A Case History’, Journal of the History of Ideas, i (1940), pp. 459–3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 27 note 2 See particularly Peter Fliess, J., Thucydides and the Politics of Bipolarity (Lousiana State University Press, 1966).Google Scholar

page 29 note 1 In his ‘Introduction’ to Andrewes, A., Greek Society (London, 1971), p. xx.Google Scholar

page 30 note 1 In Aspects of Antiquity (London, 1972), p. 137.

page 30 note 2 (London, 1973).

page 35 note 1 See Wittfogel, Karl A., Oriental Despotism (London, 1957)Google Scholar for a comprehensive discussion of seminal value.

page 35 note 2 (London, 1938), p. vii.

page 35 note 3 Buchan, John, Life of Julius Caesar (London, 1932), p. 11.Google Scholar

page 36 note 1 Three valuable studies of ancient historians are Grant, Michael, The Ancient Historians (London, 1970)Google Scholar; Usher, Stephen, The Historians of Greece and Rome (London, 1969)Google Scholar and Bury, J. B., The Ancient Greek Historians (New York, 1958).Google Scholar

page 38 note 5 In The Grandeur that was Rome (London, 1911).Google Scholar